Walter Shapiro: “The current Fox News numbers are impressive until you realize that 30 million Republicans voted in the 2016 presidential primaries. As a result, it is safe to assume that about 27 million of these GOP stalwarts are not watching Fox News on a typical evening. Reporters sometimes forget that most primary voters have better things to do with their lives than watch Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity.”

“In contrast, most political journalists are addicted to cable news, as many of them dream of a network pundit contract. So media coverage almost always exaggerates the importance of cable TV news. And it downplays other more pedestrian sources of political information, such as local TV news and the nightly reports on the broadcast networks.”

McKay Coppins: “Billed as the conservative movement’s marquee annual gathering, the conference was once known for its ability to draw together the right’s various factions and force them to compete noisily for supremacy. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan rallied paleoconservative activists against the Bob Dole wing of the GOP. In the early 2010s, Tea Partiers in Revolutionary-era garb roamed the premises while scruffy libertarians hustled to win the straw poll for Ron Paul. Yes, the speakers would say controversial things, and yes, presidential candidates would give sporadically newsworthy speeches. But more than anything, it was the friction that gave the proceedings their electric, carnivalesque quality—that rare, sometimes frightening sense that anything could happen.”

“This year, that friction was notably absent. Trump, who jump-started his career as a political celebrity with a speech at CPAC in 2011, has so thoroughly captured the institution that many of the GOP’s other stars didn’t even bother to show up. Everything about the conference—the speakers, the swag, the media personalities broadcasting from outside the ballroom—suggested that it was little more than a three-day MAGA pep rally.”

“The result: In my decade of covering the event, I’d never seen it more dead.”

“Donald Trump hates losing so much that he has suggested he will mount a third-party campaign if he doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination,” Bloomberg reports.

“But he can’t win that way either, thanks to ‘sore loser’ laws in six states he would need to return to the White House.”

“Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as Arkansas and Alabama, have laws that bar a candidate defeated in a major-party primary from running as an independent or on a third-party ticket in the general election. That would put Trump at the general-election starting gate with a deficit of 91 electoral votes of the 270 required to capture the White House.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’s thinking about running for president, WMUR reports.

Said Kennedy: “I am thinking about it. I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it.”

Walter Shapiro: “In 1995, Texas GOP Senator Phil Gramm confidently declared, ‘I have the most reliable friend that you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.’ Gramm dropped out after Iowa. In 2015, Jeb Bush was awash in money. His super PAC blew through $118 million, while his campaign spent another $34 million. And, of course, in 2020 Democrat Michael Bloomberg squandered a stunning $1.1 billion of his own money in just three months on his way to winning the caucuses in American Samoa.”

“Last month, it was front-page news that the conservative fundraising network originally associated with the Koch brothers was going to oppose Trump in the GOP primaries. But it is easy to overplay the significance of this anti-Trump move. Super PACs are handicapped in primaries because they are legally charged a much higher rate for TV ads than the candidates themselves. Also, the saturation media coverage of the presidential race means major contenders for the White House are much less dependent on TV ads than, say, Senate or House candidates.”

Ed Kilgore: “An odd amnesia seems to have obliterated memories of how completely screwed Trump initially seemed as a prospective rival to Hillary Clinton. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages from that year, Trump trailed Clinton by nearly 20 points in trial heats shortly after he announced his candidacy. Yes, he did better in later polls, but despite the partisan hype, few people were convinced he would win. He was all but written off by a variety of party figures after the Access Hollywood tapes came out in October 2016. Republican senators Kelly Ayotte, John Thune, Deb Fischer, Mike Crapo, Cory Gardner, Mark Kirk, Lisa Murkowski, and Dan Sullivan, as well as governors Gary Herbert and Bill Haslam, all renounced their support for him instantly. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told his members they should feel free to abandon their presidential nominee.”

“How electable did he look then? Even when the furor had calmed down, there was a raging debate among pollsters and pundits aimed at Nate Silver’s allegedly too positive projection that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning. And disputes about how so many people got so much of the 2016 election wrong dragged on for years.”

“So are we now supposed to believe that the Republicans who made Trump president in 2016 are going to write him off in 2024 because he can’t possibly win? The same Donald Trump who again defied the polls and nearly pulled off another shocker in 2020? And the same Republican voters who to a considerable extent believe Trump actually won a second time? This does not make a great deal of sense.”